Safety Review Finds Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Site Was Technically Sound

siddesu writes: The U.S. Department of Energy's 2008 proposal to build a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, was technically sound, a report by the NRC says. However, the closed-down project is unlikely to revive, as its staff has moved on, and there are few funds available to restart it. "With the release of the final two volumes of a five-part technical analysis, the commission closed another chapter on the controversial repository nearly five years after President Barack Obama abandoned the project, and more than a quarter century after the site was selected. While the staff recommended against approving construction, the solid technical review could embolden Republicans who now control both houses of Congress and would like to see Yucca Mountain revived."

Comments

Majority leaders home district

[Billly Gates]

That is politics for you.

Fact is no one wants the waste near them and distrust government and experts. Thank 3 mile island, chernoybl, and even the non nuclear deep water horizon. Promises of safety and advances for all 3 yet failures with lasting consequences create a boy crying wolf scenario whether justified or not.

Re:Majority leaders home district

[tnk1]

Yes, we spent more money. However, understand that the anti-nuclear message causing the anti-power issue was a tactic, not the end goal. The end goal was simply unrest in the West which would affect the West's ability to compete with the Soviet bloc in nuclear armaments. So our money pointed back at them would not have directly counteracted against their propaganda that turned into anti-nuclear NIMBY protests because we used different tactics.

No one in the USSR would have cared if we sent an anti-nuclear message to them, because they controlled their population to the extent that there would be no actual protest. The West is vulnerable to that because we have the freedom to accept NIMBY-ism. The only people who had the ability to say "not in my backyard" in the USSR would have been the Party leaders, and they were likely already covered.

So, we didn't encourage them to not use nuclear power, because it would not have had the effect we wanted. Our propaganda was to show the people of the USSR that we were prosperous and non-threatening, while being able to defend ourselves if needed. The best way to do that was free information, blue jeans and rock and roll, not countering anti-nuclear propaganda.

Re:Majority leaders home district

[Linsaran]

Fukushima was bad, but it was nothing even close to Chernobyl.

Furthermore if you average the damage done to our environment and population across all nuclear accidents ever, it's paltry compared to the amount of damage/loss of life traditional fossil fuels do. The difference is that damage from fossil fuels are like car accidents, small in scale, each one only impacting a few people, but they happen all the time. Nuclear accidents are like airline crashes, they're rare, but the impact of a single 747 going down is considerable, and impacts a lot of people. Most of the time car crashes don't make the news, but every time a 747 goes down people talk about it.

There have been exactly 2 INES level 7 nuclear disasters in the 70 odd years we've had nuclear power. Even if we take the most liberal estimates of the number of cases of cancer caused by Chernobyl, the total number of deaths related to nuclear power are still somewhere shy of 100,000. (in reality this number is probably closer to 50,000 but it's difficult to say exactly how many additional cases of cancer Chernobyl caused, with a range of between 4000 and 98,500). Coal mining alone averages 1,800 deaths a year, or 126,000 deaths over the past 70 years, and that's not even factoring in other fossil fuels.

TL;DR nuclear power is the safest cleanest, most viable option that can meet our current and future power needs.

the problem with how nuclear works in the USA

[nimbius]

Unlike many foreign countries including china and india, the US has no civil reprocessing plant for its nuclear waste. Our literal approach to high level nuclear waste is to entomb it in some sort of living grave in the desert and hope for the best; its irresponsible but creates a handful of jobs in Nevada. It also takes pressure off nuclear power companies to invest in reclamation and reprocessing technologies and frees them to simply consume fresh nuclear fissile materials without concern for their total lifespan. The management and operating contractor as of April 1, 2009 for the project is USA Repository Services, a consortium of government contractors, URS Corporation, Shaw Corporation and Areva Federal Services LLC. Yucca mountain was nothing but pork, lemon socialism for a handful of government contractors and the effort could be put to better, more sustainable projects.

The NRC report is correct! this project was technically feasible. But ethically and morally irresponsible in the 21st century where the vast majority of nuclear generating facilities, including those in russia, operate on a reprocessing model that ensures high-level waste is kept to a minimum. When the Kremlin decided to decomission the Russian navy's 4 story tall akula class submarine, its reactor cores were recycled and its coolant filtered for fissile material. What the state of nuclear power in America means is that if and when we decomission our cold-war fleets, the reactor materials will spend thousands of years idly decaying in some cave in the desert, hoping the next government shutdown doesnt affect them. And if that doesnt concern you then it should be noted in america we import 100% of our nuclear materials from Canada, Khazakstan, or in the past converted russian nuclear munitions as part of a bilateral disarmament treaty. our nuclear infrastructure is not energy independent by any means.

It's the Mining Stupid

[retroworks]

Graham Pickren wrote an excellent Ph.D thesis in 2013 "Political ecologies of electronic waste: uncertainty and legitimacy in the governance of e-waste geographies". While it isn't about nuclear waste, per se, it rather brilliantly describes how industrialized nations apply a "fetishism" to material which tracks downstreams but not upstreams. http://www.envplan.com/abstrac...

The point of the article is that the dirtiest recycling (or most questionable Yucca storage) is practically always better than the cleanest extraction (mining).... and this applies to the risk at Yucca (for storage) vs. mining uranium in the USA Southwest. Nevada's strangely among the most willing states to allow in situ mining, even when mercury effluent (from gold mining) turns their extraction points into Superfund sites. 14 years ago Nevada and NM legislators were trying to provide the private sector with $30 million to develop environmental restoration technologies for in-situ leach (ISL) mining of uranium. "In a statement from his office in Washington, D.C. Domenici said he decided to remove the ISL provisions from his comprehensive nuclear energy plan in order to calm fears stoked by "substantial misinformation about the legislation." (Gallup Independent, Nov. 10, 2001)"

Treatment of Planetary Environmental health oddly follows the same "waste centric" obsessions of western medical history. Western medicine is pretty great today, but went through a couple of centuries of giving mercury as a laxative, and being always focused on what comes out of the body rather than the nutrition stream. Closing the "waste deposit" while giving tax incentives to mine uranium is "anal retentive" environmentalism.

See also Pickren et. al. at AREA Waste, commodity fetishism and the ongoingness of economic life http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

Re:Hire new staff?

[ShanghaiBill]

Its not like the nuke waste has another home to go to. Open the damn thing already.

Actually, there is a better option: Do nothing. Just let the waste continue to accumulate in the cooling ponds at each individual plant.

The cooling ponds have sufficient capacity. Security is adequate. The waste is becoming less radioactive as it sits there. So there is no harm in waiting. A few decades from now we will have more knowledge about geology, radiation, engineering, etc., and be in a better position to make a long term decision. It is quite possible that by then we will have power plants that can burn the "waste" as fuel. Even if not, we will have much better robots and other technology that will make processing the material far cheaper than if we did it today. Sometimes procrastination is the best policy.

Re:Won't be enough

[Echo_Hotel]

What makes you think the material is going to be left there for 500 years much less 500,000?
At some point long before half a million years, reprocessing this waste is going to be economical at some point.
Plus what the hell man THIS IS SIMPLE BURYING, there's no magic super lead lining these tunnels, this is simply the most geologically stable place where an earthquake / volcano / water table won't crack open the cases, the cases aren't super over engineered for radiation they are over engineered because of nigh impossible demands that these be the last surviving creation of man standing steadfast in their tomb as the Sun goes red giant and engulfs the Earth.
AND ANOTHER THING
We CAN process the high level nuclear waste down but we won't because the result can be weapons grade and the last thing we need is another nuclear arms race, especially now with all the people that would be participating.